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A made a possibly unfair accusation on another thread that too many reviews seem to assign 8s as a score. I checked out the last 20 reviews on DiS, and of these:

There are 8 scores of 8
There are 9 scores of 7
There is one each of 6, 5 and 4

The average is about 7.1. I don't know about you, but for me, an 8 is a very strong album with wide appeal and with barely a weak track.

If there are no weak tracks and it is a genre standout (or better still, defines a new genre or a significant step forward, it's a 9).

If it's a landmark album (whatever that is, I could see a 10 being awarded). In honesty, I wonder if you could only ever retrospectively award a 10 once the album could be seen in the context of the wider musical scene.

Apologies if this has been done before, but I wondered what other DiSers felt about not just '8', but about thresholds for other scores. I know a lot of people will just feel scores are irrelevant, and the other thread on which I made my accusation queried the very point of reviews.

Looking at what I bought last year (of which say 75% was pre-2011 releases), I'd say probably five or six albums were 8s out of 30 or so purchases (and I'm a cautious buyer, informed by reviews without the 'suck it and see' mentality).

but as I'm sure has been expressed repeatedly over the years, the way the review system works is that reviewers put their name forward for stuff they want to listen to and review. This system could be changed I suppose - but I reckon the quality of the reviews would suffer if reviewers are allocated reviews they don't have any particular interest in.

From a personal point of view, I know I'm guilty of putting my name forward for things that I know I'm going to like. But then, I don't particularly want to spend my time listening to something boring, and neither do I really enjoy slagging off music.

I'm sure I've given a disproportianate amount of 8s if you look accross my reviews, but they are records I've been excited about and I'd stand by almost all of them I think. I don't neccessarilly think the scores are inflated, just that we're having a lot of reviews written by fans rather than impartial third-party writers. Maybe it's just me, but I don't neccessarilly think that's a bad thing. DiS still has its own voice through the reccomended section, events, albums of the year, news coverage, social networks and various other outlets.